Last week was quite a week for the campaign to stop a motorway flyover being built at the Basin Reserve. Events happened so rapidly that we never got round to covering them here, so here is a quick recap of the week.

Three-month extension to Basin Flyover Board of Inquiry

It had been evident for some time that the Basin “Bridge” Board of Inquiry was not going to meet its original, or even its revised, timetable. To their credit, the Board wrote to the minister and asked for an extension, which the Minister has now granted.

The Board was due to present its final report on 31 May. It now has until 31 August to report, which means that its final report, and any consequent legal action, will be happening around the time of the General Election.

Subsequent to this decision, the Board released a revised draft hearing timetable.

If you are a submitter who is making an oral submission, someone calling witnesses, or an expert witness, make sure you check this timetable and the further changes that have already occurred. Some submitters have already found that they have been scheduled to appear twice. Most individual submitters will now be scheduled to appear on Fridays. Due to the extension, there may also be a change in the hearing venue, which is currently the Amora Hotel.

Opponents of NZTA’s proposed Basin Reserve flyover have said all along that NZTA behaved in an arrogant and high-handed manner during the supposed “consultation” process on its Basin Reserve flyover plan. Now that arrogance and high-handedness has come back to bite NZTA – and it’s not just us saying it.

The updated Basin Bridge Project Traffic and Transportation Peer Review (PDF, 4.1 MB), commissioned by the Board and prepared by Abley Transportation Consultants, raises such severe criticisms of the project that NZTA’s only honourable course of action would be to withdraw their current proposal and think again. (Of course, NZTA has dismissed the Transport Peer Review’s criticisms and announced its intention to press on regardless.)

There has been a striking shift in the tone of the Dominion Post’s coverage of the proposed flyover this month, and Michael Forbes of the DomPost has prepared this excellent summary of the key criticisms contained in the Abley Report:

This article highlights the transport evidence to be presented at the forthcoming Board of Inquiry hearing by one of Save the Basin’s expert transport witnesses, David Young:

David Young, who for eight years was Transit NZ’s national planning manager, confirms that there is a low-cost at-grade option for solving Basin traffic problems without a flyover. He asks why the Agency failed to allow Wellingtonians the choice of this non-flyover option. Had it been been identified and included in the consultation process, he says, it is likely that it would have been preferred by affected parties “and would, or at least should, have been selected by the Transport Agency.”

This expert witness also says the “grossly uneconomic” flyover will cause significant adverse environmental effects and he asks why the Agency is understating environmental issues related to the flyover.